I would have judged him to have good social skills if he managed to drum up such a following to help raise money for his ventures.

Obviously depends on the crowd

And a person with a balance disorder can be great at physics, not sure what you think is strange here.

If he is able to successfully maintain an audience on social media and date celebrities while juggling multiple CEO roles it sounds to me that this disorder is mostly cured.. unless you can prove there is a region of the brain that is responsible for being tactful.

He just needs to work on not firing or picking fights with random people when in a bad mood.

We call both social skills, but they are very different, just like how balance and theoretical physics are different things. Managing a company or a large crowd requires more intellectual understanding, he has that, managing direct social interactions requires more of the intuitive parts of your brain, he might have a disorder there and it would classify him as having autism.

And just to clarify, people with autism can have great theoretical understanding of people, doesn't mean that they perform well in direct social interactions.

But this discussions doesn't seem to go anywhere, you hate the guy and want to say he is evil rather than him having a disorder. There isn't much to argue about then.

No, he's not cured, he's just rich.

Money makes A LOT of problems and difficulties and blockers go away.

I agree that no level of any autism-like issues should absolve him of being a massive narcissistic cunt though.

I don’t think he does fire people when in a bad mood. As we’ve seen in the last week he fires people when they give ridiculous reasons for poor performance though.

So what you're saying is that it's possible to study human behaviors enough to be able to put up a good performance and convince people to give you money, analogously to how someone with an inner ear condition could study physics enough to become a gymnast? Aren't contradicting yourself?

The ASD person could write a paper explaining what he wants to do because he has studied English and people enough to understand what to say to make others understand, and when others read that paper they agree and give the ASD person money.

Similarly a person with balance disorder can write a paper explaining how balance works, and others can read that paper agree and fund the persons project for making self balancing robots.

Doesn't mean the ASD person can fluently navigate social situations, but luckily modern technology means he doesn't have to. When writing papers and proposals you can spend a lot of time thinking and preparing general statements, you can't put that sort of effort into more immediate interactions.

> can fluently navigate social situations

the vast majority of human beings can not "fluently" navigate social situations either...

the very small elite percentage of those who can are the 'social butterflies' that become actors, politicians, perfect 1950s social calendar wives, etc all depending on the culture they live in.

They are mesmerizing to watch, and rare like a lovely dancer or magician or elite athlete is rare. This is not normal, it's a special talent at the tail of the bell curve.

most ACTUAL normal social interactions involve simultaneous friction of many kinds under the surface-- as people have opposing motives (money, power, sex, pride etc) and limited face-saving default tools to navigate, dismiss, avoid, or paper over that friction.

(Maybe that's the difference, autistics suck at using or accepting the use of these shoddy tools as 'fake' and give resistance to all the sub-optimal goings on??)

fake small talk and go-to phrases and jokes and polite chuckling and fake smiles and happy voice intonation ---these are the bread and butter of getting thru a interaction / dance while trying to still get what you want, balancing long term and short term incentives etc

Both people know it's fake and that's okay

----- it's exhausting to normal people too, at the 'end of a long day' it's not the physical toll

it is not evolutionarily normal to meet so many goddamn strangers every day and try to smooth over endless bits of friction (esp from so many cultures fundamentally at odds in core values and goals, but that gets into politics, so)

'normal' people deal with others sub-optimally and then let off the steam/ bitch and moan / insults and slurs to get out how they really feel in the safe space at home/ their tribe

Places where this is always at max capacity, it bubbles over and you see the failures and stress marks, i.e. strangers screaming at each other in new york traffic, littering and destroying things, unspoken boundaries (turf) being tested etc

Most of the time, 'normal people' don't know what or why they are feeling / acting out the way they are either, they just relieve their tensions any way that comes up, when they are angry at X person but take it out on Y person instead.

(hence all the psychological patterns like projection, transferring, passive ag, guilt complexes, attention seeking etc)

> the vast majority of human beings can not "fluently" navigate social situations either...

Most humans have friends, at least as children. They’re certainly not hated so much to be thrown down a flight of stairs and beaten to the point of being hospitalised as young Elon was.

I'm not sure how that's directly related, but I venture bullying among boys seems to be about the weakest / smallest / poorest/ easiest to harm and get away with it, not necessarily social skills or autistic stuff.

Violence must be met with violence, enough said there... A weak person needs support for that, and that's the issue.

Elon's biggest problem in life seems to have been his garbage narc creep of a father, who I recall even managed to blame that incident on little Elon! saying 'oh well the boy who did that said Elon made remark on a family member's sensitive passing or something, so you have to understand it was a matter of honor see', blah blah....

Kinda like the peacock's tail being attractive because it is harmful to the individual. The bigger the tail, the better the peacock, if he made it this far without getting eaten!

You can actually use autism to have good social skills. It takes a lot of work but once you realise you will never fit in, and have the same issues speaking to a thousand people as you do speaking to one person, you can speak honestly to a thousand people. Very few NTs can do this.